Category Archives: Travel

AAA Mobile – TourBook and Directions

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The American Automobile Association (AAA) mobile site is a useful one to bookmark for US residents and visitors alike whether they are driving or not. Most services do not require an AAA membership to use. The best part of AAA Mobile is the “TourBook” which provides online mobile access to the hotel, restaurant, event and attractions listings in the AAA’s print guidebooks. The AAA guides are quite comprehensive, easily rivaling commercial guides like Fodors. Listings include descriptions, address, click to … Continue reading →

Geogad – Free Audio Travel Guides

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Geogad.com is a Siicon Valley start up whose product is mobile travel guides.  Each guide is  a walking tour about an hour in length presented using maps, images and audio.  There are currently 15 tours covering San Francisco, Vancouver BC, Savannah, GA and New Orleans.  Initially the tours were available in two formats, on the web at Geogad.com or as a zip file containing a one page PDF walking map and about 50 MP3 audio clips.  You load the MP3s … Continue reading →

Just Go – Custom Mobile Travel Guides

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Just Go Guides, a new service from Portugal’s ApiApi, Lda offers a couple of mobile based alternatives to traditional paper or electronic travel guidebooks. One, JustGoGuides.mobi, is traditional mobile web based travel guide. The other is more innovative, an on-demand mobile travel guidebook publishing service. Just Go, which covers Mexican and Central and South American destinations, lets you create free custom travel guides for just the specific countries, cities and dates of your trip. The downloadable guides are offered as … Continue reading →

Marriott Mobile Recommends Opera Mini

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In the past, I’ve been pretty critical of mobile web hotel booking sites. Horrible usability, errors caused by invalid markup or excessively large pages and the inability to easily complete a booking have pretty much stymied every attempt I’ve made to book a room using the mobile web. Finding and booking a room for the night using your phone should be a no brainer. Actually it’s pretty easy if you just call the 800 number of one of the big … Continue reading →

Tripit Mobile

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I’ve been playing with Tripit.com lately, it’s a startup with a really clever but simple approach to travel planning. You don’t even have to register, just forward the confirmation e-mails that you get from airlines, car rental agencies, Orbitz, Travelocity, Amtrak, Eurostar and other travel companies and websites to [email protected]. Tripit parses the e-mails, including attached PDFs, and builds an itinerary for you, complete with historical temperatures, maps, and links to information about your destinations from Wikipedia and other sites. … Continue reading →

Zagat.mobi – Crowd Sourced Reviews

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The “wisdom of the crowd” concept where the averaged opinions of thousands of people is used to evaluate the worth of a product or idea is a certainly big part of today’s web, think of Amazon Reviews, TripAdvisor.com or Digg. As much as it’s a part of the current web 2.0 buzz it’s not a new idea. Zagat Survey has been applying the “wisdom of the crowd” since 1979. Its first product was a New York City restaurant guidebook based … Continue reading →

Thalys.mobi

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Thalys International, which provides high speed rail service between Brussels, Amsterdam, Cologne and Paris, now has a mobile site, thalys.mobi. The mobile edition offers schedule and fare lookups and contact numbers. The two main functions, Schedules and Fares are very similar and use a “wizard” interface. On the first screen you choose your start point from a drop down and click Next. A second screen prompts for destination station and for travel date and time which both default to current. … Continue reading →

FlightStats.com – International Flight Tracking

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FlightStats.com has a new mobile flight tracking service that covers international as well as domestic flights. According to their website FlightStats aggregates information from airlines, airports and government agencies around the world to provide the most complete possible flight status information. FlightStats seems to deliver what they claim, giving me estimated flight arrival information for en route flights in the US and Europe including domestic Russian flights. Data seems scarcer for some parts of the world. For flights within China … Continue reading →